1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a check processing equipment to which a courtesy amount recognition (CAR) art is applied for a document processing at a bank and, more particularly, for certifying work in a check processing.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, financial institutions are mechanizing clerical processing such as totalizing by printing routing number, an account number, etc. with a special ink, which contains iron oxide, in magnetic ink characters, which are readable both to human and machine, in an area called a clear band at the bottom of a document such as a deposit ticket and check form issued to a business acquaintance having a current account. The printed magnetic ink characters are read by a sorter computer so as to mechanize the sorting and totalizing work for incoming, outgoing in check processing. Further, if an account number, amount and other necessary information printed in magnetic ink characters, then on-us check can be processed through the sorter computer system of the bank for withdrawal from a current account.
The column of amount is usually filled by a customer by using a printer or by handwriting when the customer issues the check. A proof operator used to print the amount with magnetic ink, referring to the amount entered in the column of amount of a document. Further, the front and back (endorsement) of the document are photographed by a camera or the like and saved in the form of a microfilm (refer, for example, to Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 62-284468) as an evidence for a follow-up survey if an accident such as the loss, damage, and misdelivery of the document form which has been brought out should occur.
For accomplishing higher efficiency of the processing stated above, a system, which utilizes the character recognizing art for recognizing an amount by using a proof machine, has been proposed. The system, however, has a shortcoming in that a document must be fed out from a hopper, carried, recognized, and subjected to a series of proving steps for each minimum proof unit (transaction); and until this series of processing is defined, the recognition processing for the next transaction cannot be initiated (refer, for example, to U.S. Pat. No. 5,204,811).
There has also been proposed a document processing system based on image processing. The system includes a high-speed image capturer, large-capacity disk, high-speed network, power encoder, etc. In such a system, key entry work including the correction of amounts and balancing is performed by distributed work stations (WS), each of which is assigned a different task (refer, for example, to U.S. Pat. No. 5,237,158).
The document processing system described above is designed to match data to a corresponding actual document by E13B code, check number, etc. which are a kind of the magnetic ink characters. If, however, a trouble such as documents being switched in the course of processing happens, then it is difficult to find the documents and corresponding data thereof, making recovery from the trouble difficult. The document processing system is also disadvantageous in that the throughput of the whole system is affected by the different levels of skill of the operators who are engaged in the correction work carried out through the work stations.